Post-secular critics are currently challenging the theory that the rise of historical empiricism, as a mode of thought, replaced religious belief and praxis. According to theorist Benedict Anderson, the seventeenth century ushered in a break between a religious cosmology and history, creating a need to link fraternity, power, and time in new ways. Nationalism, an ideology that links subjective identity to a history unfolding in “homogeneous, empty time,” filled this need. New literary genres like the novel presented stories that occurred in the time and space of the nation, offering readers a means of identifying as members of a community with a common, secular history.

This panel invites papers that challenge Anderson’s well-known thesis, specifically as it posits a single epistemological function for the realist novel. As post-secular critics are aware, the realist novel does not simply hasten secular modes of thinking: instead, it engages the shifting grounds of contemporary epistemology from a variety of positions, many of which are and have been explicitly religious.